Contents
Foreword
Carolyn M. Rodgers 00
Acknowledgments 00
Introduction 00
J.W.M. (Colored) 00
The "Colored Question"
John Jones 00
From The Black Laws of Illinois, and a Few Reasons Why They
Should Be Repealed
W. Allison Sweeney 00
From "The Other Fellow's Burden"
James David Corrothers 00
"At the Closed Gate of Justice" and from The Black Cat Club
Lucy Parsons 00
"On Anarchy"
Ida B. Wells 00
From The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian
World Exposition
Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago Defender 00
March 24, 1917: "Big Dailies Worried by Recent Migration" by R.
T. Sims
January 14, 1939: "The Plight of the Jewish Minority" by Kelly
Miller
February 20 and 27, 1943: "The American Negro Press" by W. E. B.
DuBois
April 27, 1946: "Simple and the Heads" by Langston Hughes
Fenton Johnson 00
"Tired," "Prelude," "Questions," and "A Fragment"
1927 Intercollegiate Wonder Book, or The Negro in Chicago 00
From the Intercollegiate Wonder Book
Rev. John L. Tilley 00
"When Day Is Done"
Frank Marshall Davis 00
"Four Glimpses of Night" and "Frank Marshall Davis: Writer"
Leonidas M. Berry 00
From I Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey
Era Bell Thompson 00
From American Daughter
Alice Browning 00
"Old Mis' Cane"
Richard Wright 00
From "I Tried to Be a Communist"
Cyrus Colter 00
"Overnight Trip"
William Attaway 00
From Blood on the Forge
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton 00
From Black Metropolis
John Hope Franklin 00
From Racial Equality in America
Margaret Danner 00
"These Beasts and the Benin Bronze" and "Beautiful? You Are the
Most"
Richard Durham 00
From "Premonition of the Panther"
Margaret T. Burroughs 00
"For Eric Toller"
Gwendolyn Brooks 00
"To Don at Salaam," "Walter Bradford," and from Maud Martha
Dempsey J. Travis 00
From I Refuse to Learn to Fail
Hoyt W. Fuller 00
From A Journey to Africa
Herman Cromwell Gilbert 00
From The Negotiation: A Novel of Tomorrow
Frank London Brown 00
"McDougal"
Lerone Bennett Jr. 00
From Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America
Lorraine Hansberry 00
From To Be Young, Gifted, and Black
Sam Greenlee 00
From The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Ronald L. Fair 00
From Hog Butcher
Useni Eugene Perkins 00
"A Poem for Jazz Lovers and People Who Hate Wars"
Dick Gregory 00
From Nigger!
Conrad Kent Rivers 00
"Four Sheets to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France, 1933,"
"Underground," "A mourning letter from Paris," and "In defense of
black poets"
Johari Amini-Hudson 00
"Black Expressions: circa chicago state (& othr state
institutions)" and "(Untitled)"
Clarence Major 00
"Discovering Walt Whitman," "Read the Signs," "A Guy I Know on
47th and Cottage," and "The Syncopated Cakewalk"
Sterling Plumpp 00
From Blues Narratives and from Horn Man
Haki R. Madhubuti 00
From Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? and from Never
Without a Book
Carolyn Rodgers 00
"Prodigal Objects," "Sheep," "In the Shadow of Turning: Throwing
Salt," and "Jazz: Mood Indigo"
Clarence Page 00
From Showing My Color
Charles Johnson 00
"The Education of Mingo"
Fred Hampton Sr. 00
From "You Can Murder a Liberator, but You Can't Murder
Liberation"
Warren Foulks 00
"#5 The Courts"
Michael Warr 00
"Not Black Enough" and "Something's Got to Go"
Angela Jackson 00
"Journey to Africa"
Leanita McClain 00
"The Middle-class Black's Burden" and "How Chicago Taught Me to
Hate Whites"
Sandra Jackson-Opoku 00
"Ancestors: In Praise of the Imperishable" and from Hot Johnny
and the Women Who Loved Him
D. L. Crockett Smith 00
"Cowboy Eating His Children"
Marvin Tate 00
"Soulville Revisited" and "The Ebony Mannequin in the Marshall
Fields State Street Store Window"
Rohan Preston 00
"This One" and "Dreams in Soy Sauce"
Barack Obama 00
From Dreams from My Father
Elizabeth Alexander 00
"The Josephine Baker Museum" and "Blues"
Quarysh Ali Lansana 00
"hyphen," "seventy-first & king drive," "rogers park," and "fat-
free"
Tyehimba Jess 00
"Magic" and "We Live"
Regie Gibson 00
"prayer" and from "blooz man"
Angela Shannon 00
"Doris"
Audrey Petty 00
"Gettysburg"
Tara Betts 00
"Two Brothers on 35th Street" and "A Mixed Message"
Ken Green 00
"Debate" and "One Man Parade"
Afterword 00
Credits 00